Why FreeBSD is not good for most businesses
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Why FreeBSD
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I work in a former FreeBSD office. I say "former" because we are in the long process of uprooting a lot of FreeBSD architecture a previous admin forced upon us.
I am not going to get into which OS "is better" because actual performance is not the issue here. If I had to rate what I saw, FreeBSD (4.1x) worked okay for the hardware it was put on, although it probably would have worked better on a "stock install" than the kludged clusterfuck that we deal with now.
The background is this: a few years ago, the small company I worked for had two admins who were FreeBSD fanatics. They pressured the IT department to use FreeBSD because it was free, their Windows infrastructure was taxed, and they had just bought a whole lot of new hardware. The pressured FreeBSD over Redhat, and made an impressive demo. So the company started going to FreeBSD. The admins, who had impressive mod skills, "tuned and tweaked" FreeBSD to work under the specific loads of the various server functions.
This would have been a good situation to be in, but then one of them got lazy, and updates got further and further behind. The other quit. The lazy one got fired. The other admins didn't know FreeBSD and barely knew Linux. Both of them eventually quit, too. I don't blame FreeBSD for the personnel problems, but this is leading to the main problem.
The company searched for someone with FreeBSD experience. The few people they found were not the kind of people they were looking for (inexperienced, would not pass clearance, had poor work records), and now they were stuck with a rapidly aging system that wasn't supported by anyone who had a clue. The new admins they hired tried to match the previous admin's skills, but were spending so much time diagnosing crashes, they didn't have time to learn new FreeBSD skills via online sources, which are sparse, confused, unorganized, and unsupportive (don't flame me on this, because this is pretty much the opinion of the whole company). And finding corporate-level supported software and hardware to run on FreeBSD was next to impossible ("We don't support FreeBSD for our fiber channel cards," says a SAN company desperate for our business, "but we hear some guy in the Netherlands had a flaky beta driver that can see things as long as the partitions are less than 256 GB." then the Sourceforge project hasn't been updated since 2002, doesn't work on our kernel version, and the guy's website is 404...)
So they decided to go with Redhat Linux. It just works. It worked faster than FreeBSD. It had an easy-to understand packaging and script-driven administration system, corporate support, and better yet: they could find LOTS people skilled in Redhat Linux in resumes. I was a particular gem because when the hired me I was an RHCT and had experience with OpenBSD and FreeBSD experience to boot. My first project was "Get us off FreeBSD!!!" by direct order. Yes, you could argue this is not a FreeBSD issue at all, but some management of people issue, and you would be right, and that is my exact point.
If FreeBSD had a sensible corporate base, a well-thought out directory structure (I have boot scripts in/etc and/usr/local/etc... and have you ever had to diagnose which one broke?), better hardware/software vendor support, and a huge skills base, maybe with some certs... THEN we will see true competition with Linux in the corporate sector. Redhat is the type of company businesses want. They understand the support language Redhat speaks. And maybe I'll see stats that the Redhat kernel is bloated, runs 20% slower the what FreeBSD does on Apache pulls, or some fanatic going on about, "Oh yeah? What about PORTS, dumbass???" But you know what? If FreeBSD wants to be taken out of the hobbyist corner and shine in the corporate arena... it's got a lot of marketing work to do.
I got Book 5 on the day Amazon.com promised, and not only that, in the morning just before I was about to leave for vacation for a week, so I had reading material for travel! Sweet!
I have faith it will be delivered this Saturday the 16th, before 1pm. if not, I can wait...
... of a button I have that says, "Now that I have changed the master password to the main databse, it's time to discuss my salary."
We had a guy do this at a previous company with some "dated" code. I don't remember exactly how he did it, but he had altered the main SQL Query form to say, "If the date is past 10/10/96, do mass delete *" or something. It would have worked, but sadly, you had to have the admin account signed in to do any delete of certain main tables. The first time it went off, it was someone who wasn't signed on with an admin account, and she got some modal that said, "You must have admin access to do this function." So she reported it, and her manager smelled something fishy, so she at first suspected the database had been hacked. While checking the main code, someone stumbled across it. It was part of a malformed winsock call that forced the form to try and call another query that no one had ever seen before. It was then they figured out what had happened.
If anyone had tried to go, "Oh, I'll sign in as the admin and see if I get the same error..." they would have wiped out over several million records of all our customers. Sure, the databases were backed up, but to restore that would have been a real pain in the ass.
Everyone knew it had to be a certain former employee who was laid off several months earlier, but since there was no CVS in place, they couldn't prove that someone else didn't do it.
I just want to know who got the plumbing contract. Gees, 90% of these games have more plumbing running around than I have ever seen in real life. And you can't tell me they're wire conduits, they can't have THAT much wire in the future...
I did this at my previous job. The corporate policies, set in place for the 90% of the company that had no technical aptitude and only had 1-2 systems to log into, was a bitch for those in tech who had to login to multiple systems managed by multiple departments, most of them outsourced. We had:
- Kerberos Password system for most servers - A centralized web-authentication system for documentation - A second web-authentication system for graphs and metric pages - Our mailbox - Our HR/Payroll system - Our financial system (for reimbursments)
Not to mention over a dozen subsystems for various networks (like client username management, network access for switches and routers, separate mail systems, and so on). Depending on which system you were on, here were the rules:
- Some old systems had an 8-character max, non-case sensitive system which did not take non-alphanumerics - Some took a 4-char min, 16-char max system that allowed case, numbers, and some (not all, notably underscores, spaces, *, and !) punctuation - Most allowed everything, including some Control keys (^G made your password go "ping"). - Some were impossibly cryptic, and very anal.
One main PITA system only allowed you to change your password on a central web page. It had this 10-char minumum, with manadatory mixed case, nums, chars, and would reject passwords without telling you why. So you had to enter you old password, then enter in a new one, and repeat the new one, and hit "submit for verification." Then you might get mail back "The password you supplied for this login is invalid, may have violated the rules, or the system might be busy. Try again." And your password expired after 30 days, and was claimed to have a 2-year memory of past passwords (I didn't stay long enough to find out for myself) that it would reject. ARG!
So I did what you did to try and remember some stuff. Like, I had a Dell 810ht monitor, and a note that the new fax number was ext 555-2235. So I'd make a password like "Dht810_2235" and hope it got accepted.
They sell shit, they wrap it is shit, sell it by assholes, and are run by jews.
I agree with that Best Buy is not the place for an educated consumer to shop. They sell a lot of sparkly stuff and there are a lot of people who have attitude problems that work the registers, and maybe have poor management (but I know one Best Buy manager, known her for 10 years, and she's pretty cool).
But "run by Jews?" I am not Jewish, nor do I know or care the religious backgrounds of the management at Best Buy, but why would you make such a statement? That kind of comment lies back in 1895 along with, "Coloreds Only" and "Micks need not apply." C'mon, man, you can't say stuff like this in the 21st century and have anyone take you seriously. I would have agreed with "A bunch of short-sighted rich people who care more for short term profit over long term customer loyalty," or even "Capalist Corporate Asshats." But "run by Jews?" What are you, Eric Cartman?
And don't get me started on Circuit City. I don't know where you're from, but the CC around here are wastelands of hungry commision sharks who ignore anyone not making a lage purchase. There have been times when I have seen so little help on the floor or manning a register, and the store such a mess, that I have wondered if all the employees are gagged in the back room, and I came in right after a mass robbery.
Once, before I knew better, I had to get a VCR. At the time, we were poor. We saw one for $79, and asked a salesguy for help getting one. He disaapeared, and never came back. Another guy tried to upsell us to a $400 one. We said, "No... we want the cheap one." Then he said they were out, buy the $400. He then treated my wife, my technically competent wife who is head of IT at her company, like she was some dumbass giggly housewife out of a 1950's stereotype who could easily be manipulated by flattery and thus, makes the buying decisions in our house by possibly withholding sex or something. GREATLY insulted, we both left, and got one form Radio Shack (which then died two years later).
Oh, and two rebates I got from them never came back, either.
Ahh, another proponent of the "If you're not doing anything wrong, then you've got nothing to worry about" crowd. Rush Limbaugh used to stand in your ranks, until some prosecutors wanted to check out his medical records to see if he had in fact been doing something wrong.
Yes, but he did something illegal, didn't he?
WTF are you people buying that you don't want traced? Look, I understand the "mistakes happen" ploy used by the paranoid, and I admit, they do happen. Here in DC, we had a SWAT team storm the wrong house last year; they were supposed to storm the house on the other side of the street. But how often does that happen? You take things like Ruby Ridge or Waco, and make it sound like they happen daily, for god's sakes. You only hear about them more now because the media is much more world-wide than it used to be. But that's another topic.
Say they have some trace program, and see that I got a bag of fertilizer in 2004, and then I got some gopher poison in 2005 and then some matches in 2003, and some pipe and nails in 2005 (I don't know how to make a bomb, if that's not obvious). So the Feds come crashing down my door since I am making pipe bombs or whatever.
They are going to really have to get some convincing evidence that I made such bombs. If you give me the crap, "What if they plant the evidence," then that's not related to purchase tracing, since they could storm a random house and do the same thing.
Don't get me wrong, I am for privacy, but people often leave these paranoid comments with no obvious conclusion.
Tracing purchases is bad because... OMFG! B3n Fr4nkl1n aNd t0m jeferz0n wUd b3 piss0rd!! dont buY sup0rm4rk3t ca4rdz!!11!oneone AAAAAHHHHH
Now, private corporations are a different matter. Like if they had proof you were denied insurance because you bought too many pizzas and you're obvious a lard-ass... that would suck. Especially if they pegged you wrong because you bought pizzas for your scout troop or whatever. Now THAT would be a legitimate reason for not letting insurance make decisions based on purchase history. But as far as I know, they don't.
For me to agree with your paranoia, show me evidence. Show me proof of intent to fuck you over as a citizen. But just making comments about supermarket cards with no real conclusion other that some Hitchcock "you'll never compete with fear theat the audience has in their own head" stuff.
The point I was trying to make is that his "Macs don't spread viruses" philosophy was based only on brand recognition. If Mac made an automobile, he would have assumed in never crashed, no matter how badly he drove it.
The Mac and Airport he was using didn't cause the problem, it was how he had his Airport set up that caused the problem. He assumed, based solely on the fact these were Mac products, that he couldn't be to blame.
> I don't get it? did anything bad happen to the
> Mac? what you're saying is that using non-Mac
> products can get you owned?
What I am saying is that this guy assumed because he used Mac products, he was invulnerable.
> yes setting up a wireless network was maybe
> a bit stupid given such poor company security,
> but with that kind of bad IT administration
> something was bound to happen sooner or later.
Try running a dozen remote offices in shipyards across the US with only 2 IT people. And no travel expenses. They didn't expect wireless to enter into the equasion, and it wasn't until they hired me as a temp to fix it that they were aware a wireless access pint had been put in at all. It took their DSL company to say they were spouting spam to hire me for the case.
> I hope you took the hint and moved everyone
> to Mac/linux. no? "fool me once, shame on
> you..."
The day that Peachtree and PCMiler can run on Linux, call me. But in this case, I was just a contractor with no lasting value (not that I wouldn't work for them again, but I was only a temp to hired clean up the place with their permenant IT people).
The Mac mentality can be harmful. I had to go onsite to one place where a guy had managed to get the entire office hacked because of his "invulnerable Mac."
What did he do?
He hooked up an Airport wireless station to the network so he could use his "invulnerable Mac" from anywhere in his roomy office. But didn't encrypt anything. So he opened up the whole office network to a wireless node that anyone could log into.
In a shipyard.
Near a military base.
Surrounded by vacant lots in a bad part of town.
So... when we got to the office, every Windows machine was compromised, the DSL router had been reconfigured to DNS in Taiwan (because it had the default password), servers had all their root passwords changed, and there was steady traffic from who knows what back and forth. It was a mess. We ended up having to do a full DnR on all the servers and workstations (luckily, it was a small office, so it was only 6 machines).
Yes, his iBook was FINE. His "invulnerable Mac" was just GREAT! I doubt there was a single compromised thing on his creamy white laptop.
And he kept saying, "My Mac can't be hacked into, you Windows folks don't know a damn thing about how great the Mac is."
"Good thing I use Linux, then," I said, trying to capture and trace packets from my Knoppix-STD Live CD. "Care to tell me how to explain to your boss why you exposed the corporate network to an unsecured wireless connection?"
"But... you don't understand, it's a Mac! It doesn't do those things..."
When I finally sat him down and explained what the Airport does, he turned real pale. And quit a week later. He assumed because it was "an invulnerable Mac," that meant he didn't have to understand security.
This is a great series of links. Does anyone have ones for International law? I'd love to carry my Leatherman around Sweden this year, but after Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh was stabbed in that department store a few years back, I don't know how paranoid they are.
I see from the outage page that LJ people are now planning to buy their own UPS so that they don't have to trust Internap anymore
Maybe I don't see how this is run in the big picture, but a data center is more than just power to servers, the power affects switches and routers as well, which I assume you don't own - Internap does. I know in the data centers we have (all are site-redundant, what we have on the North side of town is ALWAYS synced to a redundant on the South side), if you put a UPS to a rack of servers, it won't do you a damn bit of good if the whole power grid goes kaflooey because... well, your servers may be running, but the logs will be filled with "cannot reach network" errors. You'd need UPS's for the servers, then for every switch and router in the chain all the way to the telco outside.
Pure tech is too hard to translate into a full channel, and if you dumb it down to reach a wider audience, the core people who would watch a pure tech channel can't stand the content.
One fix may be daytime "4 n00bs" programming, and then after, say, 8pm, when those people are watching CSI or some reality TV, have more hardcore stuff.
8am: Anime for the jobless 9am: Anime for the stoners 10am: TechVision presents: Gadgets for the kitchen 11am: Alton Brown 12nn: Squared Foot gardening: Gardening for people in apartments 1pm: Shojo anime 2pm: Anime for stoners: repeat (they won't know) 3pm: Anime for teens 4pm: Anime for preteens who want to be teens 5pm: Anime for kids who want to be preteens 6pm: Robots that fight with each other 7pm: "Call for Help" - for newbies 8pm: New Gadgets 9pm: Gamer's Hour 10pm: "Call for Help" - for case modders/tweakers 11pm: "Call for Help" - Linux/BSD (this may need to be 2 hours) 12mid: "Disclaimer" - Hacks for Hackers on the Edge of legality 1am: "Look what we found on Bittorrents! 2am: "Don't do this at home" 3am: Anime for stoners: repeat (they won't know)
This person can tolerate a certain level of bullshit to receive compensation.
Not to be snarky, because I have heard the same thing and taken some of it to heart, but I wonder how colleges feel about this statement. Would they boast this in recruiting ads?
[Orchestral version of "Pomp and Circumstance" plays in background, pictures of Harvard campus and the American flag show in ad] "Here at Harvard, we test a student's tolerance to the breaking point. You can be assured that a graduate of Harvard has received the highest level of bullshit capable in the modern western world. Our professors have been specially suited for saying things that are so meaningless and untrue that brutal rote memorization is commonly used to prepare your young hopeful into a cruel, and uncaring world where unprofessional conduct is the accepted norm... Please consider Harvard as your choice for the new millienium." [music swells to picture of bald eagle ripping apart a salmon]
I heard that too. But you know what? The hypothesis, "You both have the same qualifications in work experience and are both great people," is rarely true, and even if it was, one could easily say, "You both have the same qualifications in work experience, a BA degree, and are both great people... but then you wore that green tie... ecch!"
Often, IME, it's, "We have one guy with little experience, a few school references, and a BA degree who put his grade point average on the resume. Then we got this guy with no degree, but he's got job experience, excellent references, and said in the interview that he's happy where he is now, but wanted to see if we'd hire him because he was impressed how we handled blahblah, and wants in on that kind of action."
Sadly, most people out of college just want jobs, aka "starter jobs." Employers know this. Sometimes you'll get someone who is dedicated, but you also run the risk of getting someone who has a great paper pedigree, but when it comes to "real world" issues, a fresh college kid may balk, "This isn't what I've learned," or "this is not industry standard." Job experience can count for a LOT. You can go, "I ran into this a few years ago, and it turns out this project was kept alive not because it was a good project, but it was a bargaining chip during contract negotiations, kept alive only because it was a threat to cancel and do things 'in house.'" Many people would see this as a "dead end" type of job, but I'd see it as experience. Scientist jobs are like that. There is no Manhattan Project anymore, but the people who worked on that got a LOT of experience that helped them later in their careers, I bet.
I ignore HR requirements, and try and find out what they really need. I don't have a college degree, and even if they ask for a BA or something, I apply anyway. I don't lie if they ask, but many times they don't even ask. The BA requirement is there as a standard. The guy in charge of project blahblah may ask HR, "I need an SQL Database guy. Someone who knows Python to port as a back end, and get the information to Excel 2003 Spreadsheets on XP Pro boxes. I need someone good, like 2-4 years experience." HR turns this to: "Blahblah seeks DBA with Python skills to get data to MS Excel 2003. Must have 2-4 years experience, BA." But when you apply for the job, you speak with some of the people, and find out that you could port the data to a web page, and they don't need Excel to generate reports. Or the guy likes you because you seemed interested in what they do.
Yes, it's true, some HR people will pass over your resume in the pile if you don't fit ALL of the qualifications, but do you want to work for a company that hires people on that scale anyway? Maybe you are, but I think you'll be a nameless employee at a cube farm, and while you applied because you had SQL skills, one job shuffle later, you're the guy compiling TPS reports on Excel 97, and trying to justify not getting laid off every quarter ("People NEED my reports, they won't be able to function without them!").
you think your grade should only reflect your understanding of the assignment? So an "A" means "understood the assignment outstandingly" or something?
Yes, as a matter of fact, I would. I do agree strongly with your comment about "your grades should reflect your performance on the assignment," but that would go without saying if you understood it. First you understand, and then you perform.
If you think the "basic nature of higher education" is about treating the student as a consumer in the service industry, you really don't belong in higher education.
If you think it's not about the money, you need to go back to college and study the history of how they came to be. It's always been about the money. Things not directly about the money (like science labs) are about the prestige, which brings in more student, which is more money. This is not because I think the higher education system is evil, it has to survive somehow. But if I pay the $15k a year, dammit, I want to be taught a subject! True, I have to meet them halfway. I can't sleep through class, flunk the tests, and balk. That's my own stupidity. But if I go to a class, and I am tested unfairly, it's a ripoff.
in fact, you're not paying the professor at all.
No, but as you stated, you are paying the University, which gets its money through student tuition and grants. They pay the professor. If you have professors that unfairly flunk everyone, people (=money$$) will go to another college. It's a weird balance, and one that tips from time to time.
Students like you remind me of cranky customers in restaurants who call the manager over and try to get the waitress fired because they didn't like her attitude.
What if "her attitude" was to say you never ordered food, and charges you anyway? Then claims you threatened her with the butter knife?
I really hate this metaphor of the university as some kind of service industry enterprise.
And I hate poverty, but that's the cold hard facts. It is a service enterprise, gees, have you seen the tuition rates lately? The very fact that almost everyone has to get "a student loan" should tell you right there: business is OPEN! College is a HUGE business. It has been since before the Renaissance!
Why you think that a professor failing his entire class constitutes a failure on the part of the university is a mystery to me: would you be so opposed if a professor failed an astronomy class that failed to put the planets in the correct order or an economics class that couldn't describe how supply and demand affect prices?
That's different, and it's still bad because that reflects poorly on the professor. If you were a university, would you want to hire a professor of astronomy who couldn't teach people the basics (for whatever reason)?
What most of these posts are saying is that this professor did not grade these students on a reasonable test of their skills. It's kind of like a professor of Art History requiring students to discover a previously undiscovered Picasso. Sure, some may exist in people's basements or garage sales, and sometimes a new piece of art from an expired artist shows up on the auction block from an previously unknown collector of rare things, but would you consider it fair to flunk art students who could not find a new Picasso? How would you rate such a find, grade-wise?
I am lucky to have a job (touch totem, rub beads, make offering) that I like as a sysadmin, but our company has been steadily laying off people even before the dot.com bubble burst. But we still survive, and so far I have been lucky. Lucky, because I am not convinced skill is looked at as much as it should be.
That being said, I have had a look at some of the applicants, and I have to tell you, maybe it's the 9 years of previous retail experience talking, but some of the guys who apply for jobs... need polishing.
The first is attitude. I am not talking about, "I demand the following..." type of people, I am talking about grumpy, bitter people who look at our industry standard salaries and make comments about how they used to make TWICE that for HALF the work... They don't exactly come out and say that, but it comes out in other comments, like, "My previous job was for Verizon until they decided to outsource all our groups to India... leaving me out in the cold!" Yeah, sorry about that, but your negative attitude doesn't look so hot in front of the other execs, okay? And don't be afraid to admit you don't know something, because honesty is rare and appreciated.
Then we have those who... need someone with style to look them over before they go out for an interview. I haven't had a guy with a hygiene problem or anything, but when you get people who wear olive green dress shirts obviously 2 sizes too small, a non-matching tie, and jeans... again, the execs. You could be the most skilled UNIX Guru since Eric Raymond, but when some HR screener who doesn't even know what a UNIX is or does, they are going to pass. Trim that beard, get a flattering haircut, and don't slouch. Go to a nice men's store, and ask someone there to dress you for an interview in this decade.
Again, I know, it's unfair to be judged by appearance and personality, but it's no longer a techie's market. Good looks and attitude can really make or break an interview.
If I have to choose between two people who have the same skillset, I will always choose the guy or gal with a better personality and polish. Sometimes even if they don't know as much, because I'd rather teach someone a few things rather than deal with someone I don't feel comfortable with in an enclosed pod.
"Jay and Silent Bob are terrible, one-note jokes that only stoners laugh at. They're fucking clown shoes. If they were real, I'd beat the shit out of them for being so stupid. I can't believe Miramax would have anything to do with this shit. I, for one, will be boycotting this movie. Who's with me?"
Dude, we used to do this all the time when I programmed for call centers. The ANI (telecom term for caller ID) was programmed at the Layer 2 level, and like a MAC address was easy to change. We usually used ANI via a software bridge to simultaneously launch a trouble ticket indexed via phone number, but there was always the issues with Pay Phones, Hotels, or companies that hid the originating ANI behind a PBX (i.e., for security).
So, sometimes, we changed the number enroute so that it would launch a new ticket window instead of a ticket with 20,000 IDs all indexed to the same phone number. We just marked it with a random number that let the techs know this was not their real home phone, and thus, had to ask for a callback number if needed.
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I am not going to get into which OS "is better" because actual performance is not the issue here. If I had to rate what I saw, FreeBSD (4.1x) worked okay for the hardware it was put on, although it probably would have worked better on a "stock install" than the kludged clusterfuck that we deal with now.
The background is this: a few years ago, the small company I worked for had two admins who were FreeBSD fanatics. They pressured the IT department to use FreeBSD because it was free, their Windows infrastructure was taxed, and they had just bought a whole lot of new hardware. The pressured FreeBSD over Redhat, and made an impressive demo. So the company started going to FreeBSD. The admins, who had impressive mod skills, "tuned and tweaked" FreeBSD to work under the specific loads of the various server functions.
This would have been a good situation to be in, but then one of them got lazy, and updates got further and further behind. The other quit. The lazy one got fired. The other admins didn't know FreeBSD and barely knew Linux. Both of them eventually quit, too. I don't blame FreeBSD for the personnel problems, but this is leading to the main problem.
The company searched for someone with FreeBSD experience. The few people they found were not the kind of people they were looking for (inexperienced, would not pass clearance, had poor work records), and now they were stuck with a rapidly aging system that wasn't supported by anyone who had a clue. The new admins they hired tried to match the previous admin's skills, but were spending so much time diagnosing crashes, they didn't have time to learn new FreeBSD skills via online sources, which are sparse, confused, unorganized, and unsupportive (don't flame me on this, because this is pretty much the opinion of the whole company). And finding corporate-level supported software and hardware to run on FreeBSD was next to impossible ("We don't support FreeBSD for our fiber channel cards," says a SAN company desperate for our business, "but we hear some guy in the Netherlands had a flaky beta driver that can see things as long as the partitions are less than 256 GB." then the Sourceforge project hasn't been updated since 2002, doesn't work on our kernel version, and the guy's website is 404...)
So they decided to go with Redhat Linux. It just works. It worked faster than FreeBSD. It had an easy-to understand packaging and script-driven administration system, corporate support, and better yet: they could find LOTS people skilled in Redhat Linux in resumes. I was a particular gem because when the hired me I was an RHCT and had experience with OpenBSD and FreeBSD experience to boot. My first project was "Get us off FreeBSD!!!" by direct order. Yes, you could argue this is not a FreeBSD issue at all, but some management of people issue, and you would be right, and that is my exact point.
If FreeBSD had a sensible corporate base, a well-thought out directory structure (I have boot scripts in /etc and /usr/local/etc... and have you ever had to diagnose which one broke?), better hardware/software vendor support, and a huge skills base, maybe with some certs... THEN we will see true competition with Linux in the corporate sector. Redhat is the type of company businesses want. They understand the support language Redhat speaks. And maybe I'll see stats that the Redhat kernel is bloated, runs 20% slower the what FreeBSD does on Apache pulls, or some fanatic going on about, "Oh yeah? What about PORTS, dumbass???" But you know what? If FreeBSD wants to be taken out of the hobbyist corner and shine in the corporate arena... it's got a lot of marketing work to do.
I have faith it will be delivered this Saturday the 16th, before 1pm. if not, I can wait...
Boasting about the opposable thumbs again, aren't you?
We had a guy do this at a previous company with some "dated" code. I don't remember exactly how he did it, but he had altered the main SQL Query form to say, "If the date is past 10/10/96, do mass delete *" or something. It would have worked, but sadly, you had to have the admin account signed in to do any delete of certain main tables. The first time it went off, it was someone who wasn't signed on with an admin account, and she got some modal that said, "You must have admin access to do this function." So she reported it, and her manager smelled something fishy, so she at first suspected the database had been hacked. While checking the main code, someone stumbled across it. It was part of a malformed winsock call that forced the form to try and call another query that no one had ever seen before. It was then they figured out what had happened.
If anyone had tried to go, "Oh, I'll sign in as the admin and see if I get the same error..." they would have wiped out over several million records of all our customers. Sure, the databases were backed up, but to restore that would have been a real pain in the ass.
Everyone knew it had to be a certain former employee who was laid off several months earlier, but since there was no CVS in place, they couldn't prove that someone else didn't do it.
I just want to know who got the plumbing contract. Gees, 90% of these games have more plumbing running around than I have ever seen in real life. And you can't tell me they're wire conduits, they can't have THAT much wire in the future...
I did this at my previous job. The corporate policies, set in place for the 90% of the company that had no technical aptitude and only had 1-2 systems to log into, was a bitch for those in tech who had to login to multiple systems managed by multiple departments, most of them outsourced. We had:
- Kerberos Password system for most servers
- A centralized web-authentication system for documentation
- A second web-authentication system for graphs and metric pages
- Our mailbox
- Our HR/Payroll system
- Our financial system (for reimbursments)
Not to mention over a dozen subsystems for various networks (like client username management, network access for switches and routers, separate mail systems, and so on). Depending on which system you were on, here were the rules:
- Some old systems had an 8-character max, non-case sensitive system which did not take non-alphanumerics
- Some took a 4-char min, 16-char max system that allowed case, numbers, and some (not all, notably underscores, spaces, *, and !) punctuation
- Most allowed everything, including some Control keys (^G made your password go "ping").
- Some were impossibly cryptic, and very anal.
One main PITA system only allowed you to change your password on a central web page. It had this 10-char minumum, with manadatory mixed case, nums, chars, and would reject passwords without telling you why. So you had to enter you old password, then enter in a new one, and repeat the new one, and hit "submit for verification." Then you might get mail back "The password you supplied for this login is invalid, may have violated the rules, or the system might be busy. Try again." And your password expired after 30 days, and was claimed to have a 2-year memory of past passwords (I didn't stay long enough to find out for myself) that it would reject. ARG!
So I did what you did to try and remember some stuff. Like, I had a Dell 810ht monitor, and a note that the new fax number was ext 555-2235. So I'd make a password like "Dht810_2235" and hope it got accepted.
Annoying.
I agree with that Best Buy is not the place for an educated consumer to shop. They sell a lot of sparkly stuff and there are a lot of people who have attitude problems that work the registers, and maybe have poor management (but I know one Best Buy manager, known her for 10 years, and she's pretty cool).
But "run by Jews?" I am not Jewish, nor do I know or care the religious backgrounds of the management at Best Buy, but why would you make such a statement? That kind of comment lies back in 1895 along with, "Coloreds Only" and "Micks need not apply." C'mon, man, you can't say stuff like this in the 21st century and have anyone take you seriously. I would have agreed with "A bunch of short-sighted rich people who care more for short term profit over long term customer loyalty," or even "Capalist Corporate Asshats." But "run by Jews?" What are you, Eric Cartman?
And don't get me started on Circuit City. I don't know where you're from, but the CC around here are wastelands of hungry commision sharks who ignore anyone not making a lage purchase. There have been times when I have seen so little help on the floor or manning a register, and the store such a mess, that I have wondered if all the employees are gagged in the back room, and I came in right after a mass robbery.
Once, before I knew better, I had to get a VCR. At the time, we were poor. We saw one for $79, and asked a salesguy for help getting one. He disaapeared, and never came back. Another guy tried to upsell us to a $400 one. We said, "No... we want the cheap one." Then he said they were out, buy the $400. He then treated my wife, my technically competent wife who is head of IT at her company, like she was some dumbass giggly housewife out of a 1950's stereotype who could easily be manipulated by flattery and thus, makes the buying decisions in our house by possibly withholding sex or something. GREATLY insulted, we both left, and got one form Radio Shack (which then died two years later).
Oh, and two rebates I got from them never came back, either.
Yes, but he did something illegal, didn't he?
WTF are you people buying that you don't want traced? Look, I understand the "mistakes happen" ploy used by the paranoid, and I admit, they do happen. Here in DC, we had a SWAT team storm the wrong house last year; they were supposed to storm the house on the other side of the street. But how often does that happen? You take things like Ruby Ridge or Waco, and make it sound like they happen daily, for god's sakes. You only hear about them more now because the media is much more world-wide than it used to be. But that's another topic.
Say they have some trace program, and see that I got a bag of fertilizer in 2004, and then I got some gopher poison in 2005 and then some matches in 2003, and some pipe and nails in 2005 (I don't know how to make a bomb, if that's not obvious). So the Feds come crashing down my door since I am making pipe bombs or whatever.
They are going to really have to get some convincing evidence that I made such bombs. If you give me the crap, "What if they plant the evidence," then that's not related to purchase tracing, since they could storm a random house and do the same thing.
Don't get me wrong, I am for privacy, but people often leave these paranoid comments with no obvious conclusion.
Tracing purchases is bad because... OMFG! B3n Fr4nkl1n aNd t0m jeferz0n wUd b3 piss0rd!! dont buY sup0rm4rk3t ca4rdz!!11!oneone AAAAAHHHHH
Now, private corporations are a different matter. Like if they had proof you were denied insurance because you bought too many pizzas and you're obvious a lard-ass... that would suck. Especially if they pegged you wrong because you bought pizzas for your scout troop or whatever. Now THAT would be a legitimate reason for not letting insurance make decisions based on purchase history. But as far as I know, they don't.
For me to agree with your paranoia, show me evidence. Show me proof of intent to fuck you over as a citizen. But just making comments about supermarket cards with no real conclusion other that some Hitchcock "you'll never compete with fear theat the audience has in their own head" stuff.
The Mac and Airport he was using didn't cause the problem, it was how he had his Airport set up that caused the problem. He assumed, based solely on the fact these were Mac products, that he couldn't be to blame.
> I don't get it? did anything bad happen to the > Mac? what you're saying is that using non-Mac > products can get you owned? What I am saying is that this guy assumed because he used Mac products, he was invulnerable. > yes setting up a wireless network was maybe > a bit stupid given such poor company security, > but with that kind of bad IT administration > something was bound to happen sooner or later. Try running a dozen remote offices in shipyards across the US with only 2 IT people. And no travel expenses. They didn't expect wireless to enter into the equasion, and it wasn't until they hired me as a temp to fix it that they were aware a wireless access pint had been put in at all. It took their DSL company to say they were spouting spam to hire me for the case. > I hope you took the hint and moved everyone > to Mac/linux. no? "fool me once, shame on > you..." The day that Peachtree and PCMiler can run on Linux, call me. But in this case, I was just a contractor with no lasting value (not that I wouldn't work for them again, but I was only a temp to hired clean up the place with their permenant IT people).
What did he do?
He hooked up an Airport wireless station to the network so he could use his "invulnerable Mac" from anywhere in his roomy office. But didn't encrypt anything. So he opened up the whole office network to a wireless node that anyone could log into.
In a shipyard.
Near a military base.
Surrounded by vacant lots in a bad part of town.
So... when we got to the office, every Windows machine was compromised, the DSL router had been reconfigured to DNS in Taiwan (because it had the default password), servers had all their root passwords changed, and there was steady traffic from who knows what back and forth. It was a mess. We ended up having to do a full DnR on all the servers and workstations (luckily, it was a small office, so it was only 6 machines).
Yes, his iBook was FINE. His "invulnerable Mac" was just GREAT! I doubt there was a single compromised thing on his creamy white laptop.
And he kept saying, "My Mac can't be hacked into, you Windows folks don't know a damn thing about how great the Mac is."
"Good thing I use Linux, then," I said, trying to capture and trace packets from my Knoppix-STD Live CD. "Care to tell me how to explain to your boss why you exposed the corporate network to an unsecured wireless connection?"
"But... you don't understand, it's a Mac! It doesn't do those things..."
When I finally sat him down and explained what the Airport does, he turned real pale. And quit a week later. He assumed because it was "an invulnerable Mac," that meant he didn't have to understand security.
Man, what a mess that was.
Just like the trailer it will show during commercial! ... perfect match.
This is a great series of links. Does anyone have ones for International law? I'd love to carry my Leatherman around Sweden this year, but after Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh was stabbed in that department store a few years back, I don't know how paranoid they are.
Maybe I don't see how this is run in the big picture, but a data center is more than just power to servers, the power affects switches and routers as well, which I assume you don't own - Internap does. I know in the data centers we have (all are site-redundant, what we have on the North side of town is ALWAYS synced to a redundant on the South side), if you put a UPS to a rack of servers, it won't do you a damn bit of good if the whole power grid goes kaflooey because... well, your servers may be running, but the logs will be filled with "cannot reach network" errors. You'd need UPS's for the servers, then for every switch and router in the chain all the way to the telco outside.
Right?
Pure tech is too hard to translate into a full channel, and if you dumb it down to reach a wider audience, the core people who would watch a pure tech channel can't stand the content.
One fix may be daytime "4 n00bs" programming, and then after, say, 8pm, when those people are watching CSI or some reality TV, have more hardcore stuff.
8am: Anime for the jobless
9am: Anime for the stoners
10am: TechVision presents: Gadgets for the kitchen
11am: Alton Brown
12nn: Squared Foot gardening: Gardening for people in apartments
1pm: Shojo anime
2pm: Anime for stoners: repeat (they won't know)
3pm: Anime for teens
4pm: Anime for preteens who want to be teens
5pm: Anime for kids who want to be preteens
6pm: Robots that fight with each other
7pm: "Call for Help" - for newbies
8pm: New Gadgets
9pm: Gamer's Hour
10pm: "Call for Help" - for case modders/tweakers
11pm: "Call for Help" - Linux/BSD (this may need to be 2 hours)
12mid: "Disclaimer" - Hacks for Hackers on the Edge of legality
1am: "Look what we found on Bittorrents!
2am: "Don't do this at home"
3am: Anime for stoners: repeat (they won't know)
Not to be snarky, because I have heard the same thing and taken some of it to heart, but I wonder how colleges feel about this statement. Would they boast this in recruiting ads?
[Orchestral version of "Pomp and Circumstance" plays in background, pictures of Harvard campus and the American flag show in ad] "Here at Harvard, we test a student's tolerance to the breaking point. You can be assured that a graduate of Harvard has received the highest level of bullshit capable in the modern western world. Our professors have been specially suited for saying things that are so meaningless and untrue that brutal rote memorization is commonly used to prepare your young hopeful into a cruel, and uncaring world where unprofessional conduct is the accepted norm... Please consider Harvard as your choice for the new millienium." [music swells to picture of bald eagle ripping apart a salmon]
Often, IME, it's, "We have one guy with little experience, a few school references, and a BA degree who put his grade point average on the resume. Then we got this guy with no degree, but he's got job experience, excellent references, and said in the interview that he's happy where he is now, but wanted to see if we'd hire him because he was impressed how we handled blahblah, and wants in on that kind of action."
Sadly, most people out of college just want jobs, aka "starter jobs." Employers know this. Sometimes you'll get someone who is dedicated, but you also run the risk of getting someone who has a great paper pedigree, but when it comes to "real world" issues, a fresh college kid may balk, "This isn't what I've learned," or "this is not industry standard." Job experience can count for a LOT. You can go, "I ran into this a few years ago, and it turns out this project was kept alive not because it was a good project, but it was a bargaining chip during contract negotiations, kept alive only because it was a threat to cancel and do things 'in house.'" Many people would see this as a "dead end" type of job, but I'd see it as experience. Scientist jobs are like that. There is no Manhattan Project anymore, but the people who worked on that got a LOT of experience that helped them later in their careers, I bet.
I ignore HR requirements, and try and find out what they really need. I don't have a college degree, and even if they ask for a BA or something, I apply anyway. I don't lie if they ask, but many times they don't even ask. The BA requirement is there as a standard. The guy in charge of project blahblah may ask HR, "I need an SQL Database guy. Someone who knows Python to port as a back end, and get the information to Excel 2003 Spreadsheets on XP Pro boxes. I need someone good, like 2-4 years experience." HR turns this to: "Blahblah seeks DBA with Python skills to get data to MS Excel 2003. Must have 2-4 years experience, BA." But when you apply for the job, you speak with some of the people, and find out that you could port the data to a web page, and they don't need Excel to generate reports. Or the guy likes you because you seemed interested in what they do.
Yes, it's true, some HR people will pass over your resume in the pile if you don't fit ALL of the qualifications, but do you want to work for a company that hires people on that scale anyway? Maybe you are, but I think you'll be a nameless employee at a cube farm, and while you applied because you had SQL skills, one job shuffle later, you're the guy compiling TPS reports on Excel 97, and trying to justify not getting laid off every quarter ("People NEED my reports, they won't be able to function without them!").
Yes, as a matter of fact, I would. I do agree strongly with your comment about "your grades should reflect your performance on the assignment," but that would go without saying if you understood it. First you understand, and then you perform.
If you think the "basic nature of higher education" is about treating the student as a consumer in the service industry, you really don't belong in higher education.
If you think it's not about the money, you need to go back to college and study the history of how they came to be. It's always been about the money. Things not directly about the money (like science labs) are about the prestige, which brings in more student, which is more money. This is not because I think the higher education system is evil, it has to survive somehow. But if I pay the $15k a year, dammit, I want to be taught a subject! True, I have to meet them halfway. I can't sleep through class, flunk the tests, and balk. That's my own stupidity. But if I go to a class, and I am tested unfairly, it's a ripoff.
in fact, you're not paying the professor at all.
No, but as you stated, you are paying the University, which gets its money through student tuition and grants. They pay the professor. If you have professors that unfairly flunk everyone, people (=money$$) will go to another college. It's a weird balance, and one that tips from time to time.
Students like you remind me of cranky customers in restaurants who call the manager over and try to get the waitress fired because they didn't like her attitude.
What if "her attitude" was to say you never ordered food, and charges you anyway? Then claims you threatened her with the butter knife?
I really hate this metaphor of the university as some kind of service industry enterprise.
And I hate poverty, but that's the cold hard facts. It is a service enterprise, gees, have you seen the tuition rates lately? The very fact that almost everyone has to get "a student loan" should tell you right there: business is OPEN! College is a HUGE business. It has been since before the Renaissance!
That's different, and it's still bad because that reflects poorly on the professor. If you were a university, would you want to hire a professor of astronomy who couldn't teach people the basics (for whatever reason)?
What most of these posts are saying is that this professor did not grade these students on a reasonable test of their skills. It's kind of like a professor of Art History requiring students to discover a previously undiscovered Picasso. Sure, some may exist in people's basements or garage sales, and sometimes a new piece of art from an expired artist shows up on the auction block from an previously unknown collector of rare things, but would you consider it fair to flunk art students who could not find a new Picasso? How would you rate such a find, grade-wise?
That being said, I have had a look at some of the applicants, and I have to tell you, maybe it's the 9 years of previous retail experience talking, but some of the guys who apply for jobs... need polishing.
The first is attitude. I am not talking about, "I demand the following..." type of people, I am talking about grumpy, bitter people who look at our industry standard salaries and make comments about how they used to make TWICE that for HALF the work... They don't exactly come out and say that, but it comes out in other comments, like, "My previous job was for Verizon until they decided to outsource all our groups to India... leaving me out in the cold!" Yeah, sorry about that, but your negative attitude doesn't look so hot in front of the other execs, okay? And don't be afraid to admit you don't know something, because honesty is rare and appreciated.
Then we have those who... need someone with style to look them over before they go out for an interview. I haven't had a guy with a hygiene problem or anything, but when you get people who wear olive green dress shirts obviously 2 sizes too small, a non-matching tie, and jeans... again, the execs. You could be the most skilled UNIX Guru since Eric Raymond, but when some HR screener who doesn't even know what a UNIX is or does, they are going to pass. Trim that beard, get a flattering haircut, and don't slouch. Go to a nice men's store, and ask someone there to dress you for an interview in this decade.
Again, I know, it's unfair to be judged by appearance and personality, but it's no longer a techie's market. Good looks and attitude can really make or break an interview.
If I have to choose between two people who have the same skillset, I will always choose the guy or gal with a better personality and polish. Sometimes even if they don't know as much, because I'd rather teach someone a few things rather than deal with someone I don't feel comfortable with in an enclosed pod.
God... some assembly required.
Not his best film, but I liked it, too.
http://www.moviepoopshoot.com/old/3.html
[ Big fan of J&SB ]
"Jay and Silent Bob are terrible, one-note jokes that only stoners laugh at. They're fucking clown shoes. If they were real, I'd beat the shit out of them for being so stupid. I can't believe Miramax would have anything to do with this shit. I, for one, will be boycotting this movie. Who's with me?"
So, sometimes, we changed the number enroute so that it would launch a new ticket window instead of a ticket with 20,000 IDs all indexed to the same phone number. We just marked it with a random number that let the techs know this was not their real home phone, and thus, had to ask for a callback number if needed.
We also had hackers that did this as well, like one guy in Vancouver who hacked the ANI so he could make illegal and harrassing long distance calls in the US using a US 800 number that would, in theory, make the call unbillable.
Then there's the mysterious 604 number that people get from time to time...